Storage Nation

1.  Everybody has it. 2.  All implementations are the same.

I wrote a post yesterday that showed IOPS calculations for a few different native wide striping configurations and I thought I'd add storage tiering to the mix today.  Native wide striping places data from all volumes across all drives in the array (or of a certain drive class if you have mixed drives in your array) and randomizes workloads across all resources.

Tiered storage is one of those terms which people use freely and assume that everyone understands. The basic concept is that you can reduce the cost of storage by assigning your data to different cost tiers of storage depending on the requirements of the data. However, there are different technologies to address tiered storage which can make a great deal of difference in the value or benefits that can be derived.

Jon Toigo likes to say that storage vendors exist to rip off their customers. If it was up to him, the world would run on do it yourself arrays made with adapter cards.  Read about his most recent experience with that approach on his blog where he says:. Tell you what, folks:  if you are building big general purpose arrays with big drives, best to put RAID 5 in the rear view mirror.  Rebuild times for anything over a TB per drive suck big time. That's one of the reasons to look at serious storage technology from 3PAR.  Here is what one of our customers had to say on their blog about their experience with array rebuilds on our product this week.

You know when you hear your own company say something over, and over again – sometimes one can have their own doubts. I remember the first time Donatelli (formerly at EMC, now at HP) told me: “in 2-3 years, there will be no place for a high-performance rotating rust disk, we’ll only have solid state and very large slow magnetic media” (that was about 1 year ago). I was a bit skeptical.    I was also talking to a customer about it yesterday, and we debated about cross-over points (not whether it would happen, but just timelines). This just clears away any of my skepticism